Milagros ricourt

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Copyright © 2016 by Milagros Ricourt

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Manufactured in the United States of America

for the women de piel color de azabache who gave me life and knowledge: my great- grandmothers, gregoria Rodriguez

and Quita Diprés; my great- grandaunt, elisa Diprés; my grandmother, esperanza Rodriguez; and my mother, andrea Diprés

coNTeNTS

Preface ix

1 Introduction 3

2 Border at the crossroads 22

3 The creolization of Race 45

4 Cimarrones: The Seeds of Subversion 71

5 Criollismo Religioso 103

6 Race, culture, and National Identity 135

Notes 155

Bibliography 171

Index 183

PReface

Today more than ever, the Dominican Republic is in the eye of the storm of racial relations. The current debate on citizenship denial to Dominicans of Hai-

tian ancestry; the thousands of undocumented Haitians facing deportation; the

spreading of anti- Haitian sentiments; the violence against Haitians throughout

the Dominican territory each poured a drop unleashing a national and inter-

national storm. The storm’s winds blow against the Dominican Republic gov-

ernment, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the oligarchy, and their media.

Rather than receive total acceptance from the Dominican population, the poli-

cies of the government are questioned. An important number of Dominican

women and men from different social backgrounds and organizations abhor

the government, and several international institutions have sanctioned it.

The Dominican diaspora has pronounced against the Dominican government

through a series of articles in newspapers, including the New York Times; dem-

onstrated in front of Dominican embassies and consulates; and sought advo-

cacy with the United States Congress and Black Caucuses. The response of the

Dominican government has been to accuse Dominican protesters of being anti-

Dominican. And because he spoke and wrote against the government, Junot

Díaz, a Dominican American writer and winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize,

received threats that he would be stripped of the honor the Dominican govern-

ment had awarded him back in 2009.

The Dominican Republic has always been in the eye of the storm. Domini-

cans are known for their racism against Haitians and their understanding of

themselves as whites— a burlesque of negrophobia and white supremacy that I

never doubted was totally dominant. But in spite of violence, surveillance, and

a fierce socialization process, many Dominicans battle against the continuity of

white supremacist values, accept their blackness, and consider themselves part

of the Caribbean archipelago.

I was one of them. I remember walking amid ackee trees on the Jamaican

Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, looking at men and women

wearing dreadlocks and listening to a different language, and not feeling lost in

translation. I felt I belonged. I was connected to the hot weather, to the rhythm,

to the ocean view, to the loud voices, to the drum beatings, to the anguish of

x PReface

poverty, to the bloody sound of violence, and to the ackee tree, transported

along with the people who brought it in slave ships from West Africa.

My experience and the experience of other Dominicans are unknown to

many, and telling about these disparate narratives became an obsession with

me. But how could I explain all this? A long process of reading, traveling to

Haiti and other Caribbean Islands, visits to archives, observation of Dominicans

both in country and throughout the diaspora followed, and through the years I

accumulated hundreds of pages of historical facts, ethnographic observations,

summaries, and quotations from books and chronicles. The result, a chaotic

tome, sat sadly on my desk.

In the middle of my frustration over what to do with all this, I met my men-

tor, Professor Roger Sanjek, during a reunion of our Queens College project

group (the New Immigrants and Old American Project). He asked me about my

research. I told him that I had written this manuscript that was lost in words

and going nowhere, and he told me to mail it to him. I did, and afterward we

started an intense academic dialogue. For two years Professor Sanjek pushed

me to reflect further on the direction of the manuscript and its main ideas, do

some reading here and there, and rewrite. And the professor’s own editing skills

moved the words beautifully, producing, finally, a coherent manuscript. This

book is the result of that working process, and it’s not only mine but Roger’s.

And thanks to Loni Sanjek, Roger’s wife, for her kind words of encouragement.

I’m also thankful to other colleagues who kindly read parts of the manu-

script and provided me with very worthwhile suggestions and criticism. Pro-

fessor Michaeline Crichlow provided many helpful suggestions for chapter 1,

Professor Kathleen López read chapter 2 with a critical eye, and the contribu-

tions of Distinguished Professor Laird Bergad greatly strengthened the historical

argument in chapter 3. Theologian Hector Laporta carefully reviewed chapter 5.

This book states strongly that a more complex Dominican national imagi-

nary exists and that it is advancing in the Dominican Republic. The voices of

Dominicans rejecting racism and xenophobia are louder than ever, and white

supremacists are being subverted by the practices and knowledge of the people.

Africa is nearer.

The Dominican Racial Imaginary

MaP of HISPaNIoLa

Haiti is on the left of the dashed line; the Dominican Republic is on the right side. There are several locations on the Haitian side that are important to highlight. First, all mountain ranges in the Dominican Republic extend into Haiti, including Plaine du Nord (which is a continuation of the Septentrional Mountain Range), Massif du Nord (a continuation of the Central Mountain Range), Montagues Noires (a continuation of the Neiba Mountain Range), and Massif de la Sella (a continuation of the Bahoruco Mountains). These are not labeled on the Haitian side of the map because of space issues, but they do bridge the national divide. And just like the mountain ranges, Maroonage during the Spanish colonial rule of the entire island in sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries extended into what is today Haiti. When the western side of the island was granted to France in 1697, there were maroon villages already established in these mountains. Second, the village of Anse- à- Pitre is in Haiti across from Perdernales on the Dominican side. I walked into Anse- à- Pitre during my research to talk and photograph RaRa assemblies and to visit several Vodou altars. The village of Oaunaminthe, or Juan Mendez in Spanish, is across from Dajabon in Haiti. Oaunaminthe was the place where many Haitians sought refuge when fleeing from the 1937 massacre.

Source: NASA. Map by Michael Siegel, Rutgers Cartography Lab, 2016.

3

1

Introduction

This book starts with a simple question: Why do Dominicans deny the African component of their genetic DNA, culture, and history? This question has been

raised before: authors from myriad disciplines have investigated the meaning

of race in the Dominican Republic, many of them concluding that Dominicans

profess European ancestry, deny their blackness, and, correspondingly, despise

their neighboring Haitians’ African origins.1 It is assumed that all Dominicans

are equally in denial of their racial ancestry and that, although largely a national

populace of mulattos and blacks, they envisage themselves as ancestrally white,

or perhaps as somehow decolorized.2 These assertions locate Dominicans, who

occupy the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola, as victims of a distorted

history that claims their nation to be Hispanic and Catholic in opposition to

an African and “barbaric” Haiti, which occupies the western part of the island.

This critical perspective on “official” Dominican history, a history in fact

embraced by many Dominicans, remains largely uncontested, even today. Thus,

a racially anomalous, Peau noire, masques blancs country with a deep Fanonian

psychological schism apparently persists; yet at the same time it is one side of a

coin that has its Haitian counterface. Haitians are les damnés in Dominican eyes,

envisaged within an ideology of racial stereotypes, anti- Haitian attitudes, and

historical distortions.

These critical viewpoints, however, are at odds with my experience across

five decades living in and out of the Dominican Republic. Was it I, as I began to

ask myself, who was in denial? Were the people I encountered in the southern

Dominican Republic countryside also in denial? Were my mother, grandmother,

and great- grandmother in denial as well?

I grew up hearing what were understood to be African drums during funer-

als, in celebrations of the Virgen del Carmen (Virgin of Mount Carmel) in the

rural community of Doña Ana, and when taking long walks with my grandmother

4 cHaPTeR 1

from the city of San Cristóbal to visit my great- grandmother in the nearby rural

community of Samangola. Located in what used to be the center of a slave plan-

tation in colonial times, the designation “Samangola” was believed to have been

created by enslaved Africans who arrived on Hispaniola from the Angola region.

As a child, I remember walking behind a bakini, a funeral procession for

an infant, and trying to understand the lyrics, a mixture of African and Span-

ish words, that people were singing. Anthropologists trace this tradition to